Humor: Cargo Cult Programming

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 17:08:39 EST
Derek Martin said:

>At some point hitherto, Jerry Feldman hath spake thusly:

>> Before the widspread use of windowing systems, emacs provided the multi-
>> windows support.
>
>Screen has been around forever, which accomplishes the same thing.
>And, vim also supports this functionality.

Well, I guess for relatively small values of 'forever' :)

The Changelog file for screen only dates back to 1991.  So I guess for most
people 11 years may be considered forever.  However, I'm willing to 
bet Jerry was referring to a time well before 1991 when he stated the 
above.  Especially considering that X dates back to about 1984-5 or 
so, and Emacs in various incarnations has been around since at least 
the early-mid 1970s (if you count teco, from which I believed it is 
derived, then the 1960s).

But, for all practical purposes, yeah, screen exists, and has for a 
very long time :)

>Emacs is, was and always will be a pig.

Well, yeah, so.  If I remember correctly, so is your Xterra ;)

>I do still sometimes use Emacs, and I like it.  I would not really
>categorize myself as a vi bigot...  But I do think that if you can get
>over the wierd vi commands, vim is better for most purposes because it
>does have most of the same text editing features, but has a much
>smaller memory footprint and start-up time.  'S just my opinion.  =8^)

I'm curious, why did you decide to switch?  I mean, the start-up time 
and memory footprint of emacs is no worse than Mozilla, and far 
better than older versions of Netscape.

With the amount CPU and memory systems typically have now (usually a 
requirement for certain other OSes), Linux seldom needs the amount of 
resources at it's disposal, so Emacs should run just fine.

Given that, and the fact that one (i.e. you) already knows emacs very well 
after having used it for years, why switch?
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!